


Meta: On What Should Have Been, In An Ideal World

by lalaietha



Series: Renegotiations of Fate [1]
Category: Valdemar Series - Mercedes Lackey
Genre: Meta, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-06
Updated: 2019-11-05
Packaged: 2021-01-23 18:47:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,294
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21324916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaietha/pseuds/lalaietha
Summary: Taking on-page explanations of various facets of things like lifebonds, Companion-bonds, divine intervention/interference in the world, and the assumption that the gods are neither total idiots nor total saditsts, one is forced to the conclusion that in a perfect world, Tylendel Frelennye was being set up as the definitive counter to Ma'ar's multiple-incarnation-body-stealing self, and that shit went wrong around about the time of his brother's first sexual experience and everything else was the universe desperately trying to get back on track.
Series: Renegotiations of Fate [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/15084
Comments: 7
Kudos: 76





	1. What Was Originally Meant to Have Been

**Author's Note:**

> Original version posted in comments on a personal journal several years ago; moved here in my project of Tidying Up And Finishing Off This Verse. (late 2019)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Part one of two parts of meta on the underlying nature of this AU.

Here's the thing: if you look at what canon says about the purpose of lifebonds, and you take into account the ways in which the purpose of the Companions is to protect Valdemar, and you look at the Ma'ar-Leareth ends of thing, it becomes really strongly suggested that originally, in a world where nothing went horribly wrong, Tylendel was meant to be the Chosen Saviour of Valdemar who smacked down Leareth-Ma'ar, possibly even for good. But that things started going horribly wrong with Tylendel eavesdropping on his twin's first sexual experiences. 

Because, like, here is the sequence if that doesn't happen: 

1\. Gala comes for him shortly before or immediately after his Gifts wake up. 

2\. They wake up - this incredibly large diverse unusual array of Gifts - and he's immediately trained by Savil, one of the best, and well-suited to him. (We'll get to that.) 

3\. Vanyel shows up a little while later and boom, lifebond! as well as an opportunity for Tylendel to learn about human damage and how to help with it in an intimate and personal (and supported) situation. 

4\. Tylendel grows up into amazing mage and pwns this version of Ma'ar, because he is more or less psychologically invincible and when it comes down to it, psychology is Ma'ar's battleground. He likes to fuck with people's heads and play on their fears and damages and so on and he'll be up against this Tylendel. 

Ideal!Tylendel, who has a twin-bond, a Companion-bond and a lifebond? Unassailable.

So that's your ideal, right: that's the thing that's supposed to happen. 

Then you have this woman who, for her own fucked up reasons, decides that sleeping with a twelve-year-old boy is okay. And you know what, let's not mess around here: an adult having sex with a twelveyear old boy is just as fucked up as an adult having sex with a twelve year old girl, and no it doesn't matter how mature they _look_, and no it's not less problematic if the child happened to be developed enough to be horny. 

And you have that twelve-year-old's twin, whose Gift is just awake enough to reach out between them, who decides to listen in. 

Now it's not actually shocking that this would prove a traumatic experience: the deck is stacked hard against Tylendel here, as sexual experiences can be intense and disorienting when you're that young no matter what, he's also getting both his own and Staven's disorientation, plus he himself is not attracted to women, plus - let's be blunt here - there are highly likely to be some _very_ complex feelings of fear-arousal-excitement-fear-guilt-etc going on with his twin given the givens. So you have him falling into his first huge fit, and . . . .everything goes off the rails from there. 

Tylendel spends the next two years - from twelve to fourteen - firstly being a significant danger to others, terrifying anyone who had anything to do with him, and also putting himself through significant pain every time it happened, and then after people perceived indications of his same-sex attraction as an absolutely rejected pariah, and he's very, very clear that if he hadn't been Staven's twin, he would have been Dealt With. His twin was, for two years, his only human contact and the only reason he had food, water and shelter. 

So instead of normal, balanced kid with a good family grounding but a fully-formed sense of self, Gala ends up coming for a totally fucked up terrified kid with massive abandonment issues whose only companion and protector through his significant trauma was his twin brother, creating a massive sense of obligation, guilt and disempowerment. 

And it's this fucked up kid that starts his mage-training, and here we have the first crack: a balanced Tylendel probably COULD have been effectively weaned away from his family's feud, and maybe even been the one to come up with a solution or peaceful resolution to it. A balanced, whole Tylendel would have a normal relationship with his twin: close, loving, but equally balanced on both sides and probably with a normal sense of the times a brother is irritating, or annoying - or just dead wrong about something. That Tylendel could see where Stav was getting caught up in the toxicity of the feud, could potentially see why the feud itself was stupid, and would be able to see where Staven's interpretations of what was going on weren't necessarily 100% correct - and how a better way could be found. Hell, that Tylendel might be able to be a _useful influence_ on getting Stav to interact with the whole thing more balanced level. 

Fucked up Tylendel who feels he owes everything to his twin? Nope. Especially since that Tylendel is one who knows that the adults around him, the supposed wiser and cooler heads, the authorities in his life, can potentially turn on him on a dime: this is a Tylendel whose _parents_ decided he was basically cursed and possessed, after all. Not only can they turn on him, but they can just be Totally Wrong - and Stav stuck by _him_ under those conditions, so what kind of absolute traitorous fuck would he have to be not to stand by his twin now? This is not a boy who can be "weaned" away from this feud, this is not a situation where this can be addressed by anything less than very directed means . . . but nobody does that. 

Another crack: Gala is a great Companion for the balanced, sane Tylendel. She's the older sister of his soul, and that's fantastic for the balanced, whole, ideal Tylendel. But for this Lendel? This Lendel doesn't need an older sister: he needs a lot more than that, and is much more lost than that. This Tylendel is not a case for, as it were, a trainee-Companion, which to all indications is what he gets: he needed an elder, a teacher-mother-mentor-grandmother.

As for Savil? Again, fantastic mentor for whole!Tylendel - genuinely. He would have needed that grounded, no-nonsense influence, would in fact have needed someone who wasn't influenced so easily or readily with other people's feelings. But messed-up Tylendel needed someone who was much better at reading, and understanding, and adapting to the needs of an emotionally damaged teenager, one who doesn't even realize how much he doesn't trust adults or authorities, or how much he was damaged by everyone turning on him. She herself said: she's not good at people. So it doesn't work. 

And Van, well - it's always going to come out a little messed up to frame someone else's damage and recovery in terms of its effect on their partner, but in this case the fact of the matter is helping Vanyel adjust into a healthy adult would have made the whole/unbroken Tylendel his best self in ways that nothing else would have, because nothing else would have demanded he learn the same skills and do the same work while offering him something (a healthy, happy life-mate without gaping emotional wounds) that would have been worth making that effort. Because a Tylendel who wasn't fucked up himself would have seen very rapidly just how deeply fucked up Vanyel was, and also how that fact made their relationship potentially very weird and potentially damaging in turn. He would have seen the extent of Vanyel's deep emotional latching onto him in total absence of all other healthy relationships, and gone OH GOD WHAT THE FUCK THIS IS WRONG, and found ways to nurture Vanyel actually, you know, making other friends, and having other ways of establishing self-value; he would have recognized his excessive influence/potential control and gone AHHHH what do I do with this how do I not fuck it up? And there would have been people to tell him. It would have been hard, and it would have demanded huge efforts of him, but ironically helping Vanyel build a base level of psychological health would have made Tylendel a much stronger, smarter person. And it probably would have helped with distancing him from the feud, because it would have been a direct illustration of how stupid and toxic the values and "honour"-concepts of the nobility were, with a painful example right in front of him of how the same ideals that were what Stav was touting were exactly what caused Withen to fuck Vanyel right up. 

And out the end of that you end up with Vanyel Ashkevron whose single overwhelming personal characteristic, if you pay any attention to any point before Shit Goes Horribly Wrong when he's not desperately fronting to protect himself, is his profound ability to love and support and care for. Bluntly speaking the only thing that keeps Vanyel as he starts out from being a perfect fit for Supporting, Loving Wife is his gender, which once he hit 18 and they gave his father the finger would not have mattered much. And someone with the job that Tylendel had to do would have benefitted AMAZINGLY from that. 

But that's not what happened.

Instead, you have broken Tylendel. Broken Tylendel with abandonment issues, mistrust of adults and authority, and profound absolute terror of being left alone, along with an obsessive guilty loyalty to his twin and the idea that love should be all-encompassing and all-consuming, because if it wasn't Stav would have abandoned him too, and there's no other framework anyone else is giving him to understand what his twin did (or what his parents and the rest of his people did). So of course he would do anything for his twin and of course Van would do anything for him, that's what love is, that's how it works, why would he need to worry about Vanyel loving him too much or doing too much or them getting entwined too fast? And why would he talk to anyone else about what's going on, every time anyone brings up his twin it's to yell at him and tell him that his twin is bad and what his twin is doing is bad and that he's supposed to abandon the only person who ever stood by him, so why the hell would he open up to anyone? 

And you have . . . canon, where Tylendel's influence on Vanyel is profoundly unhealthy and completely unconsidered, and rapidly turns manipulative, exploitative and fundamentally abusive as soon as Tylendel's unbalanced by the trauma of his twin's death, with a Companion and a mentor who are both brutally underqualified and unequipped to deal with any of this, or even see how wrong it's going. So Tylendel plots murder-revenge, and Gala makes the _worst_ possible mistake she could do, and everything goes from there.

(Which bears noting: Gala's decision was _just_ as dramatic, emotional, thoughtless and senseless as Tylendel's, which is more or less the most vivid possible proof that she was young and unqualified: to a large extent _she fucked up_ when it came to her responsibility as a divinity-thing, and then her reaction to that fuck-up was to suicide-by-wyrsa. She's more or less as bad as her Chosen which, while not shocking, is also not optimal.) 

Canonically, this ends with Tylendel throwing himself off a cliff - and now all of a sudden, someone has to come up with an alternative. He was supposed to save Valdemar and now he's dead, and the only other available option appears to be the lifemate he's just left behind, whose Gifts have just been torn open in match to Tylendel's (plus a few extra) - nobody else has that full combination. So you can sort of see the whole thing scrambling to throw Vanyel into the vacated spot, often to their deep unease. The original plan is now impossible!

Time for the last-minute backup plan.


	2. The Messier and More Interesting Alternative

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Part two of two parts of meta on the underlying assumptions of this AU.

Now the other thing about this verse is that I'll be upfront about it: I find Stefen both boring/irritating as a character, and also the willingness of the narrative to overlook the potential problems of the age gap a little bit queasy-making in many ways. Ironically, this is in part because I know enough about at-risk youth and the occasions where significant-age-gape relationships work that all of the things that the narrative tries to argue make it so that it's "okay" that Stefen is seventeen and Vanyel is nearly forty actually . . . work the other way around. 

As a child of neglect and deprivation, with very little parenting, it is in fact absolutely plausible that Stefen is sexually extremely precocious even if you do assume that he was not, prior to the Bardic College, ever sexually traumatized - but it also heightens the likelihood of his driving need to build protective relationships by whatever means necessary. The narrative rather unsettlingly frames Stefen's drive to get noble patronage and thus secure a comfortable position as if not a full personality flaw at least certainly a personality _lack_, framing it as something he "grows out of" into the required selflessness later on, but that kind of thing in someone of Stefen's background is more reasonable to site in very understandable terror of ending up freezing and starving again. That Stefen is extremely sexually active and precocious to be honest in a Valdemaran context - where he's already born on the street in a society that heavily favours those with Good Family, and queer in a society at least as homophobic as the twentieth century in our world, and is also quite sexually conservative in terms of when you're "allowed" to have sex at all - just makes him _more vulnerable_ to potential abuse and harm, and gives him fewer protections, rather than making him "worldly" and able to look after himself. 

Similarly Vanyel's canonical lack of relationships and so on and lack of comparative "skill" in interpersonal interactions makes him more likely to fuck this kid up by chance, without any malice, because of those factors. The imbalance of power and all the other things involved are just so extreme that it's very, very uncomfortable on top of just not finding Stefen that interesting. 

[a note here, per 2019: as it seems that fandom lately has a difficulty with this sort of thing, I'd like to clarify that this discomfort/disinterest of mine does not, in fact, mean that anyone who prefers the canonical arrangements or who loves Van and Stef's relationship is bad, or needs to change, or anything else. It's a personal interest thing; others are allowed to have different takes, or even to be interested in the relationship because of its potential to go horribly wrong. JUST SO THAT'S CLEAR.]

The net result of all of the above is that I find myself much more interested in contemplating what happens if Tylendel is _not_ successful in his suicide. We know from canon that people can survive and learn to live with the loss of a lifebond: there's no reason why a Companion-bond should be so absolutely different. So what happens then? What happens if you do assume that Tylendel survives, and they have to go on from there? 

Now the thing is on an overall level, as I laid out above: everything has gone _hideously_ wrong, and even if Tylendel is prevented from throwing himself off the cliff, that's still a moment when everyone is distracted from Vanyel and Vanyel still has every reason to flee off into the forest and get lost and Chosen. Everyone is still devastated and confused and has no idea what to do, and the whole clear Divine Plan above has been thrown into total disarray. 

And the thing is, you'll notice that Van? Even in canon, Van was chosen by an _adult_ Companion. An older adult. One who'd raised her own offspring. And the Choice surprises even other Companions. Shocks them, in fact. 

It reads to me, so much, like a desperate scramble to try and fix what otherwise would be the total death-knell of Valdemar: a Valdemar without either Tylendel _or_ Vanyel is a dead Valdemar. It was supposed to be all full of great heroes and goodness, and instead everything warped and shifted and now Vanyel _has_ to live and _has_ to become a Herald because otherwise it's all doomed.

I don't think that changes if Tylendel survives; I went with the idea that the destruction of Gate that ripped Van wide open Gift-wise burned Tylendel's Mage-Gift specifically right out, so that he no longer has it (because giving him back the full imbalance of the magic/mind-magic storms he'd had to start with might be A Bit Much), which means he's still not capable of being the Hero: that responsibility still passes to Vanyel, and he's still absolutely necessary. So now you have a different set of paths to start with, but along towards the same set of destinations (while still respecting the sort of meta-requirement of the original that the point here is to Keep Leareth From Wiping Valdemar Off The Map). 

To me the obvious result is that in the end, this turns them into the inverse mirror of that original ideal. 

The original ideal were a sturdy, grounded partnership (plus Companion) because they'd built solidly from the ground up with no real bad to rot them in the first place. They were supposed to have just had all the best opportunities to become their best, strongest selves. 

My Van and Lendel are the inverse reflection: they're an unbreakable partnership because they went through being _completely fucking broken_. and then mended themselves through the other side.

I end up thinking of [kintsugi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kintsugi). You can see where they broke. It even still has effects. And there are parts that are still breakable. But it's run all through with these seams of repair that are even better than the original and, perhaps more importantly, they know that they can do the same with anything else that happens. And the thing is, like with kintsugi, the repair was _incredibly expensive_, and required skill, and the result doesn't actually look like what the original vessel did and isn't necessarily aesthetically pleasing (because when you're really repairing something, sometimes it broke in awkward places). 

They're sharper and harder and more jagged and they fight with each other in a way they might not have done and there's old sore spots but when it comes down to it, when it's needed, it doesn't matter. They understand in their very bones that love isn't actually about having warm and fuzzy feelings for another person. Love is following someone into hell, not even because you can't live without them, but because they need you to - and love is also making a really big fucking effort to make sure you're not being so stupid that you're going to need to drag your loved one through hell.

They were both completely broken into little pieces and had to rebuild themselves, and they did that around one single absolute certainty - a certainty even greater than Yfandes' Choice, because Van has _seen_ Companions repudiate - and that is that no matter what happens he and Tylendel have each other - and _all_ that truth means, including that if either of them doesn't know how to look after themselves, they're going to hurt the other and that slavish _unthinking_ devotion (Van's to Lendel, Lendel's to his twin) is what got them into this.

[And I'd never been quite certain before but honestly, as I write this? I think they survived Leareth and DID go off to the Vale to live the rest of their lives (which, given all the abuse they'd put themselves and their bodies thru, were not that much longer) in retirement. Because I don't actually think Leareth has a hope in hell of surviving that - not these two, knowing themselves, each other, every kind of hell, and standing together in absolute certainty with 'Fandes behind them.]


End file.
